I saw a photo today of my famous namesake Matisyahu literally wrapping himself in the Israeli flag. I don’t begrudge the singer – who, I seem to recall, is from White Plains, NY – his sense of commitment or connection to the State of Israel. I am well aware that many of my fellow Jews share that and, rather than denying them, I would prefer to find some way to negotiate this vast ideological difference between us. This is how I feel about many of my relatives who, after all, are still family regardless of the starkly different ways that we see the world. I hope that they treat me with the same charity.

Those of us who are not committed to the state of Israel do need to recognize that people like Matisyahu, many of my cousins and my surviving aunt have very strong and entirely sincere connections to the “Holy Land.” It is not the product of rational consideration – such feelings rarely are – and thus cannot be interrogated in rational terms. It is a feeling of belonging with roots that reach deep in the soil of recent (20th century, in any event) Jewish history, and which resonates in millennia of Jewish traditions and practice; we have been saying “next year in Jerusalem” at Pesach for 1,500 years or more. This connection is no more receptive to rationality than is a toddler’s fear of the dark.

Nor is someone like Matisyahu, or my cousin, necessarily a bad person because they feel this non-rational, affective connection to the State of Israel, or at least their vision of it. It is not unusual for any of us to wear blinders for those people, institutions and, yes, states that we love. We are willing to excuse much in the name of belonging, and I have no doubt that Matisyahu felt wrapped in belonging as he draped himself in the Blue-and-White. That sense of being part of something – a political party, a movement, a community, a country – is powerful. I am reminded of the time when a New York Rangers fan threatened to kill me, and then made moves to carry out his threat, because I wore a Montreal Canadiens sweater to a game at Madison Square Garden.

Yet, belonging is passive. Draping a flag over one’s shoulders, claiming to be Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day, or feeling that swell of pride when you see the Stars and Stripes, doesn’t demand any agency. You merely have to be there. It is mostly a consequence of accidents – of history, of birth – and not of positive actions. Sure, one can choose to belong, but only if they will have you, and that is almost never assured.

I see a contradiction – a paradox, or maybe an aporia – in Matisyahu’s flag, and in that sense of belonging that seems to animate so much unthinking Jewish support for the State of Israel and Zionism: It is how they produce their selves as part of something, while not having to actually do anything as selves to be part of anything. Perhaps there is something dialectical there that, when I can unravel its mysteries, will give reason and meaning to the whole thing.

In my own non-rational way, I felt a sense of betrayal when I saw that picture of Matisyahu with his belonging sealed by the Israeli flag. This was the man who so moved me in 2009 when he sang,

All my life, I’ve been waitin’ for (waitin’ for)
I’ve been prayin’ for (prayin’ for), for the people to say
That we don’t wanna fight no more (fight no more)
There’ll be no more wars (no more wars), and our children will play

… And yet he was wrapped in the flag of a state that has killed 32,000 people in Gaza, and 13,000 of those were children who will never play again.

24 March 2024

***

One of the great differences between Zionist Jews (the clear majority of our community) and non-Zionist Jews (that minority of us who do not regard the State of Israel as the center of, or even essential to our Jewish lives) is our attitude toward each other’s Jewishness. I know of no non-Zionist Jews who doubt or deny the Jewishness of our Zionist Shvesterkind.

Yet, it is an article of faith among most contemporary Zionists (and not only the Jewish ones!) that adherence to Zionism is the essential condition of Jewishness.

Thus, those of us who do not turn toward Jerusalem and make obeisance to the State of Israel are, by definition, not Jews at all. This, even if you go to shul, keep kosher, and observe the Torah.

Aside from the fact that this is, in the view of scholars like Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a heresy, and apart from the fact that denying a Jew’s Jewishness is sort of one the most antisemitic things that you can do, it makes it impossible for us even to talk. Perhaps that’s the point.

While we – or, at least speaking for myself, I – desperately wish to communicate with fellow Jews, about the War on Gaza and Zionism, yes, but also about all of the ideas, practices and experiences that we share AS Jews, they only wish to shut us down. They have, and continue to, turned their backs on their fellow Jews. We are dead to them. One Zionist Jew recent told me that they hope I am murdered by a Hamas gunman or a neo-Nazi terrorist, “I really don’t care which.”

That, and not the unwillingness of many of us in the Diaspora to follow the majority into the Zionist heresy, is what has ruptured Jewish life. Like many, if not most of my fellow non-Zionist Jews, I am ready and willing, indeed eager, to talk past these differences and to recognize my Zionist family and friends as Jews, even if I fundamentally disagree with them about Zionism and the State of Israel. And even if I will do my best to change their minds.

The survival of our “always dying people” depends on this dialogue and, at least at the level of our shared Jewishness, our mutual respect.

But the Zionists just won’t have it.

22 March 2024

***

It was disorienting to read Rebecca Cypess’s commentary “At the Anti-Israel Carnival” in the Jewish Review of Books this week. Cypess is a music professor and an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. She is also the co-chair of Rutgers JFAS (Jewish Faculty, Administrators, and Staff), one of those Zionist watchdog groups which have been so vocal on American campuses in the last few months.

In her article, Cypess describes a campus gripped in the madness of a carnivalesque atmosphere (in the process deploying a gratuitous name-drop of Mikhail Bakhtin that would make any first-year graduate student proud) with costumes (!) and “inversions of ideals central to a university education.” And, as I walked up to my office at Rutgers University today, where I teach 20th Century World History and the History of Western Civilization (where the carnivalesque often makes an actual historical appearance), I found myself wondering “which Rutgers University is Cypess even talking about?!”

The fact is that I have seen no evidence of the celebrations “of the carnal or profane” which the good Dean contends “have consistently celebrated actual bodily violence,” and I am on campus four days per week. I have seen nothing like that at all. Sure, there are students wearing keffieyehs and a few black-white-green-red flags, but none of the weirdness she claims to have observed, like the student who “turned up to a lecture on a November afternoon wearing bright green pants and a red, white, and black Fair-Isle sweater. Most remarkably, she had dyed her hair the fire-engine red of a clown wig.”

I mean… It’s possible; the kids these days, like the kids of generations past, do sometimes dress in ways that give me – a grey, tweedy history prof a few years past his best-buy date – pause. On the other hand, that’s probably what Dr. Van Nus thought when I came to his Canadian History class with a Mohawk back in the 1980s, and Cypess never makes it clear whether such fashion statements are a common occurrence or just an isolated case. (She does complain a lot about keffiyehs, however.)

I teach in Newark, and not in New Brunswick, the campus that my students derisively refer to as “the country club.” So, I guess there’s that. On the other hand, Rutgers-Newark (or RU-N) is one of the most diverse college campuses in the US, where only 21 percent of the student body is white, and where somewhere between a quarter and a third of my students are Muslims or come from Middle Eastern and South Asian backgrounds.

Cypess is entitled to her opinion of course but, here’s the thing: I’m not really sure just what it is. On one level, her polemic is very much like dozens of others penned by Zionist academics and college administrators which claim to reveal the “awful truth” of “rampant campus antisemitism” to the glee and approval of redhatted right-wing anti-intellectuals who never trusted universities in the first place. In that sense, her article has a “hey! Listen to me!” grandstanding flavor to it. Yet, she never makes any reference to, you know, actual antisemitism.

The dean does say that “Jewish students have told me that they have been ‘stared down’” by keffiyeh-wearing classmates, although she does not mention how many Jewish students confided in her (two?), or who started the staring contest, or whether they were wearing IDF T-shirts or Israeli flags. I mean… how did the students in keffiyehs even know that the students they were “staring down” were Jewish, and how did the latter know they were being stared down because they were Jewish… And how does she know that the students wearing the keffiyehs weren’t Jewish? She’s making a whole lot of assumptions here. It is impossible to assess the extent to which these staring contests are pervasive, antisemitic, or political.

Similarly Dean Cypess tells of an unnamed professor at a talk given by Omar Shakir at RU-N (I did not attend) who was heckled after declaring “I am speaking as an Israeli, I am speaking as a Jew, and I am speaking as a Zionist…” Yet, she fails to note whether he was heckled for being Jewish, or an Israeli Zionist. Cypess is making a wild leap here about the heckler’s motivations – motivations she could not know unless she can also read minds. I did not attend the talk, but I know of other Jewish faculty who did, and they do not recall any remotely antisemitic comments. (Yeah… I asked.) What’s more, the incident must have been brief and trivial, since the only news report of the talk, in the student newspaper The Daily Targum, makes no mention of it. Did it even happen?

Significantly, Dean Cypess tells us that Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director of the Nobel Prize-winning NGO Human Rights Watch “is notorious for demonizing Israel.” Apparently, the good Dean believes that statements like “warning signs were already blinking red – a track record of unlawful attacks by Israeli armed forces and Palestinian armed groups, unprecedented repression and apartheid against Palestinians, dehumanizing rhetoric by Israeli officials and glorification of attacks on civilians by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups” (in The Guardian) demonize the State of Israel. Or, maybe she means that the article that Shakir published in The Forward (a Jewish newspaper) about how Israeli officials were trying to deport him is a kind of “notorious demonization?”

But maybe that’s the point: Cypess’s complaint is not about antisemitism (since she does not actually report on any in her article), or even anything that remotely challenges the “ideals central to a university education,” but simply about criticism of the State of Israel. I mean, she doesn’t even say that criticism of the State of Israel is antisemitic, and thus illegitimate (which is the refrain of most Maximalist Zionists) but that any criticism of the State of Israel is illegitimate (a “carnivalesque inversion”) because… Because it is criticism of the State of Israel?

That’s where my head really begins to spin. I can’t quite make out what Dean Cypess is actually saying here. Is she suggesting that criticism of any government is prima facie illegitimate? I remember my parents taking me, when I was 12-years-old to demonstrations outside the Soviet consulate in Montreal to demand justice for the Refuseniks. A decade later, I marched to demand an end to Apartheid in South Africa. And I braved the February cold with 150,000 other Montrealers in 2003 to demand an end to the US invasion of Iraq. Is Cypess really suggesting that criticism of any state, and participating in demonstrations against their violations of human rights or military aggression – whether those states are the Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa, the United States, Putin’s Russia, or the State of Israel – are all an ”ugly hatred?”

Or perhaps she is suggesting that, despite the claims of generations of Zionists from Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion to Benjamin Netanyahu and, I presume, the dean herself, that they want the State of Israel to be treated “like any other country,” it deserves special treatment. That is, unlike the United States, South Africa, Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, the State of Israel must be spared international condemnation and accountability for its military aggression and brazen violations of international law and human rights because… what? Because alone among all other countries, the State of Israel is a special case.

Cypess concludes her baffling polemic with a call to action: “Undoing the inversions, lies, and base behavior that this hatred has engendered will require a renewed commitment to the central mission of American colleges. My university would be a good place to start.” Perhaps the best place to renew our commitment to the central mission of the university would be to unmask the claims of Zionist champions like Cypess for the vacuous Israeli propaganda that it is.

21 March 2024

***

One of many things that troubles me about Rebecca Cypess’s polemic in the Jewish Review of Books is the way that the on-campus organization she heads, Rutgers JFAS (Jewish Faculty, Administrators, and Staff) has arrogated the right of Jewish members of the Rutgers community and faculty to represent themselves. Organized under the aegis of Rutgers Hillel, Rutgers JFAS is committed to combatting “anti-Israel bias on our campuses,” thus making it an explicitly Zionist organization. This is not surprising, given that Hillel International will only partner with Zionist organizations, and categorically rejects the possibility of a non-Zionist Jewish life (despite its claim that “there isn’t one way to be Jewish”).

Rutgers JFAS is not alone. There are similar organizations at other institutions which claim, as Zionists do, to speak for all Jews in their respective academic communities. These groups have been an essential part of promoting the Maximalist Zionist shibboleth that any criticism of the State of Israel is prima facie antisemitism, and the myth, beloved of the far-right, that American college campuses are swamps of violent antisemitism. And, because they have been able to promote these fallacies unchallenged, as the self-appointed representatives of all Jews in their academic communities. What they say in the service of their ideological investments, with the arrogated authority of representing Jews, becomes “the truth” in unchallenged repetition.

I have looked around to see if there is an organization that speaks for the Jews in our academic community that does not seek to advance the cause of Zionism and promote its myths. There does not seem to be one. So, I have to ask whether any of my Rutgers colleagues would like to collaborate on establishing an organization to speak for the welfare and interests of Jewish members of our academic community that is not a mouthpiece for Zionism and the State of Israel? Such a fellowship would be of immense value at this difficult moment in our history, and into a post-war, maybe even post-Zionist future.

22 March 2024

***

“Before now, I never really thought that being a pacifist was an option.” My student had waited for his classmates at the end of my lecture on the Cold War. I find that young people are often shy and tentative about what they don’t know, even in a college history class. Appearances are important this social-media-enabled, post-COVID age, they are the very stuff of social capital, and I got a sense that this student did not want to telegraph something that he hadn’t known before.

He wanted to talk about pacifism. I had devoted a whole class period before spring break to the global peace movement that emerged after 1918, liberal internationalism (and its failures), and pacifism. Readings for that class included Gandhi, whom some students vaguely knew as a figure from the Indian independence movement, Leo Tolstoy, who I have some trouble respecting and who one of my students only knew from Anna Karenina (who am I to judge?), and Bertrand Russell, who no one had ever heard of before. It had been a productive conversation, ranging from abstract discussions of morality and ethics to the practical matters addressed by Russell about the limits of pacifism in the face of ideologies like National Socialism.

In today’s class, we had been talking about the atomic bomb and the nuclear disarmament movement that bequeathed the Peace symbol on the world. I showed a short film about the Greenham Common Peace Camp, and this student came away inspired. The idea that it was possible to oppose war thoughtfully, and with principle, came as a surprise to them.

Indeed, actively opposing war is rarely presented as an option today. Our popular culture is replete with tales of heroism and derring-do, and the protagonists of our movies and television shows invariably deploy violence in their adventures, albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Captain Pike would prefer to talk it out, but he always has his phaser handy, Marvel’s Echo will skip the talking and just kick the shit out of the baddies from the get-go.

It is no wonder that war is the first, and not the last, choice in most of the world, and not just in highly militarized and militaristic societies like in the State of Israel. American foreign policy typically begins with threats of violence, or at least threats deploying violent rhetoric like “trade war” and “retaliation.” The State of Israel doesn’t even just make threats, since Israeli political culture regards war as a positive good, and the military as the embodiment of the nation. After the successful repulse of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, there was never any doubt, and no pause to consider any other option, that it would be followed by a brutal, murderous war that has killed 32,000 Gazans.

War is the obvious next step, not merely, as Carl von Clausewitz famously observed, “a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means,” but as politics and diplomacy itself. Peace, thus, is not a positive human condition to which we should aspire and toward which we must work, but merely those increasingly sporadic, and perhaps even undesirable pauses between the real human project – unending conflict. It is almost as if our political leaders read Ernst Junger’s glorification of war as the ultimate human experience Storm of Steel (no doubt along with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged) and thought “hmmm… yeah, that sounds about right,” and so many of us just went along.

The idea of war is so normal today even to young people in the United States like my student – and open-ended, remote-control war against vague ideas like “terrorism” in the name of ambiguous notions like “security” – that the idea of peace seems so strange that they never really even think about it. As my student walked with me to the Newark Light Rail station after class, he said “I always thought that war was just the way things are, that it’s inevitable. When I registered for the draft, it never occurred to me that this was anything other than a typical thing that you did when you turned 18, like registering to vote. I didn’t really think about what it means.” I asked him what he thought now. “I don’t like it,” he said.

We stopped at the entry to the station at the corner of University and Raymond Boulevard. I invited my student to come to my office hour on Thursday if he wanted to talk more, and he accepted the invitation. “I guess I’m a pacifist now,” he said. “Now I have to think about how to be a pacifist.” I turned and went down the steps to catch my train.

19 March 2024

***

Jared Kushner wants to develop Gaza’s beachfront real estate. “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner said in an interview yesterday. “But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.”

I had to shake my head and reflect that a rich real estate developer’s only solution for anything is more real estate development that will make him richer. Kushner, like his father-in-law, cannot see people for the properties; what I mean is that the lives of the people whom he would evict from Gaza – Gazans – are of secondary importance, if they are of any importance at all, to the business opportunities created by the State of Israel’s brutal War on Gaza. “I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there,” Kushner said. “I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job.”

That’s probably a sensible way for a greedy slumlord to talk, but it is neither humane nor just (not that slumlords are concerned about humanity and justice). People, according to this way of thinking, are of not value or consequence and Kushner, who styles himself as something of a great statesman, really doesn’t care about them at all.

Remember the Trump peace plan that he negotiated on behalf of his father-in-law four years ago? It was supposed to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict by doing an end-run around the Palestinian people to normalize the State of Israel’s relations with some of its regional neighbors (who are also Trump-Kushner financial partners). Nothing was settled (except maybe a few deals), and Palestinians found themselves out in the cold, ignored to such an extent that the State of Israel seems to now believe that it can obliterate Gaza with nobody saying so much as “boo.” Kushner wants to move Palestinians to the desert.

The whole thing is so ridiculously tone-deaf that I am inclined to just laugh it off. Yet, Kushner, as profoundly stupid as he might be, is nonetheless an Important Public Figure, with prominence in the American Jewish community, and some people take him seriously. Among those who do is Donald Trump and, should the disgraced former president be elected the next president, which seems very possible at this point, I can imagine that son-in-law will be instrumental in setting the US government’s Palestine policy. There is a real possibility, then, that the survivors of Gaza might be trucked off into the desert to make way for Gaza’s beachfront development.

Kushner is a classic makher (a big shot) who likes to throw his money around. In that sense, he is not unlike the other ganzer knakers who claim to be, and are regarded by so many American Jews, as the elites of our community. “They are not in their own sphere,” the firebrand Bernard Lazare wrote of our upper-classes shortly before his death in 1903, “they exceed all bounds and their rottenness becomes more stinking.”

Lazare’s proposal for what we should do with our would-be leaders like Kushner rings just as true more than a century later. We “believed them to be Jews, but now that they have become anti-Semites, what are the Jews waiting for to kick them aside?” Kick Kushner to the curb, where he belongs.

20 March 2024

***

“Stop whining, it isn’t all about the Jews, it’s about Palestine.” The message went on in greater detail about how “Jews like you” trying to “make this all about yourselves, like you always do.” My interlocutor had taken exception to the 5 March entry in my Gaza Journal, where I related my experience with antisemitism on a New Jersey Transit train. He might have had a point if this journal had only addressed antisemitism, or had I minimized the plight of Palestinians.

I am well-aware that it is “about Palestine,” of course, and certainly about Palestinians – real, flesh-and-blood people – suffering under Israeli oppression and violence, and aspiring to actualize a homeland called Palestine. But much to my interlocutor’s disappointment, I imagine, I am a Jew and the antisemitism that has always been there in America has found renewed breath and life as Israeli bombs and shells have gutted Gaza.

It is not that opposition to the State of Israel and criticism of its policies is prima facie antisemitic, as the Maximalist Zionists like to say, or that opposition to the slaughter of Gazans is somehow motivated by atavistic Jew-hate. Far from it, a good many Jews are in the frontlines of pro-Palestinian, and anti-Zionist activism – often motivated by their very understanding of what it means to be Jewish.

But hate pollinates hate, and violence fertilizes violence and, while opposition to the State of Israel is not antisemitic, some antisemites have taken advantage of this moment to use anti-Zionism as a vehicle for their a priori antisemitism. Just like my interlocutor who cannot understand how one can be appalled by more than one hatred at once and who, revealingly enough, chose to express himself using the old antisemitic trope of how “the Jews” are always “whining.”

18 March 2024

***

The government of my home country doesn’t often make me feel proud, but the resolution passed by the Canadian parliament yesterday did give me something of a tingle of satisfaction, even if my heart did not actually swell. Initially, Heather MacPherson a member of the New Democratic Party (the left-ish party that has been supporting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal minority government since 2021) introduced a motion that would “officially recognize the State of Palestine.” There was no chance that the Liberals would allow that to pass – after all, no G7 country has recognized a Palestinian state and, to be honest, Trudeau does not have the nerve to be the first – but they need the NDP to stay afloat, so they negotiated a compromise.

Although watered down, and including the usual boilerplate about condemning Hamas, the resolution calling for “an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages,” the cessation of “further authorization and transfer of arms exports to Israel” and “continued funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)” (among other things) passed with a vote of 204 to 117. The resolution does not become law, since it was introduced by a member of the Opposition, but it does publicly and morally bind the government to a demand for a ceasefire, and to “actively pursue the goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, including towards the establishment of the State of Palestine as part of a negotiated two-state solution, and maintain Canada’s position that Israel has a right to exist in peace and security with its neighbours.”

Given official intransigence just south of the world’s longest undefended border, even with (or perhaps especially with) cracks appearing in the United States’ pro-Israel façade, the Canadian resolution is significant. There is movement and change among the US’s main allies, and the State of Israel is increasingly isolated, in a way that it has never been in its history, just before its planned offensive in Rafah. Washington has indicated to Benjamin Netanyahu that such an operation would cross a line in the sand and, facing the complete alienation of even formerly staunch supporters, the Israeli prime minister must be weighing his options.

The Canadian resolution is not what I would have wished; my preference would have been for the motion proposed by the NDP (the party of which I was a member when I lived in Canada). And I am fairly certain that the more Quixotic among my anti-Zionist friends, who are holding out for a single-state Cockaigne, will dismiss the call for a two-state solution as a betrayal. Yet, this is a step, an indication of change that portends greater changes.

And that seems like something worth welcoming.

19 March 2024

***